Hopper’s view

An exhibit of summertime impressions

July 17, 2011|By Jonathan Levitt, Globe Correspondent

MONHEGAN ISLAND, Maine - We came to see where Edward Hopper painted. He spent four summers here, from 1916 to 1919. He walked the island, stopping to make small, spontaneous pictures of the ocean and landscape. About his time here, Hopper said, “Maine is so beautiful and the weather is so fine in the summer - that’s why I come here to rest and to paint a little too.’’

We got off the ferry, grabbed coffee at the Carina Grocery, and headed up Main Street. We made our way on dirt roads lined with beach roses and on trails through cathedral woods of spruce and balsam fir. We went looking for the cliffs at Blackhead, for the waves crashing at Gull Rock, for the neat peaked roofs of Monhegan Village - all captured by Hopper in thick paint and loose brushstrokes. As it often is, it was too foggy to see, so we spent the day wandering in the drizzle, imagining that everything is exactly as it was when Hopper was here.

The exhibition “Edward Hopper’s Maine’’ opened at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art on Friday. With about 90 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints, the show is a broad representation of Hopper’s work over nine nonconsecutive summers in Ogunquit, Monhegan, Rockland, Portland, Cape Elizabeth, and Pemaquid between 1914 and 1929, when he turned 47. There is also a room of paintings, mostly seascapes, made by Hopper’s contemporaries John Marin, Rockwell Kent, Marsden Hartley, and George Bellows. The painter Alex Katz designed the installation of the Hopper pictures.

Last week, with the show’s catalog as our guide, my girl- friend and I and our two dogs drove up and down the coast to see what Hopper saw.

Ogunquit 1914 and 1915 Hopper had recently returned from France and settled in New York. Uninspired, he came to Maine.

He stayed at Mrs. Daniel Perkins’s boardinghouse on Perkins Cove, a tidal basin that functioned as both fishing harbor and summer art colony.

According to the catalog’s essay by Carol Troyen, a Hopper scholar, many of the Ogunquit paintings were “conventionally picturesque.’’ Things got more interesting when he turned his back on the shore and painted the buildings.

“Rocks and Houses, Ogunquit’’ and “Road in Maine’’ are two of the great paintings from that first summer.

“ ‘Rocks and Houses’ is so wacky,’’ said Kevin Salatino, director of the museum. “It is almost as if Hopper is perversely suppressing the picturesque.’’

The summer of 1915 was cold and foggy and there was not much opportunity to paint outside.

Monhegan 1916 to 1919 Monhegan is 10 miles out to sea, not even 2 miles long, and not quite a mile wide. The island is gouged by the surf, bound by rounded lichen and seagull-covered basaltic headlands, and dotted with shingled cottages and tidy kitchen gardens.

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